Sunday, November 1, 2009

Overnight bus trips are long and you don´t really sleep as much as you expect to especially when the bus is driving along curvy, partially paved mountain roads and hurtling down hills in the pitch dark. But overnight trips do save on hostel costs and you get a lot of mileage out of the way in the process. We left Loja, Ecuador at 11pm on Friday and we arrived in Piura, Peru at 7am the next day. At 3am all of the passengers were awakened and ushered off the bus to take care of border formalities - getting our exit stamps from Ecuador, walking across a bridge to Peru, and getting an entrance stamp by a dude in a track suit sitting in a blank room with lizards crawling across the walls and a single lightbulb to illuminate the process. It all felt like a dream when the morning sky started to light up and we became aware of the surroundings in a brand new country! Loja is in the mountains so we had descended to sea level by the time we stepped off the bus in Piura. We then immediately switched buses several more times in Chiclayo and then Trujillo and ended our trip in the beach town of Huanchaco, Peru, a small, relaxed surfing town filled with tourists - both Peruvian and foreigners. This beach, unlike rainy Puerto Lopez, is sunny and warm! And since we are just at the edge of a massive desert that we drove for 6 hours through, the heat is dry and quite perect. Speaking of this desert, I had no idea before I got here that northern Peru, at least west of the Andes, is a huge sandy, flat expanse of desert that goes right up to the ocean!

In Huanchaco we are camping in the beautiful yard of a hostel right on the oceanfront. The tent got too hot this morning so I just took my sleeping bag into the hammock that is set up almost directly outside of the tent and continued to recover from the long bus ride by sleeping for another hour or so, late into the morning. Tomorrow I think we will visit some ruins that are really close, just into the desert a little ways. I am very excited to be in a new country! I am working on learning the new exchange rate for Peruvian Soles and I am listening for what Peruvian spanish sounds like since there is usually a slight difference from country to country! Anyway, the internet is cutting me off now so I will leave you with this...more later!

1 comment:

  1. What a surreal experience at the border! Glad to know you are in the sun and it is hot. It's sunny and 44 degrees here this morning. Tiger doesn't want to stay outside very long as the days get colder! Enjoy the warmth. Love, mom

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